


Keith's Birthday Week Drabbles

by StandinShadow



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Child Abandonment, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Keith's Birthday Week 2017
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-23
Updated: 2017-10-22
Packaged: 2019-01-21 16:12:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12461298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StandinShadow/pseuds/StandinShadow
Summary: A ficlet for each day of Keith's Birthday week.





	1. Bonds

  Lance stares out the window of the castle, smiling softly as he sees the rain falling in slow patterns. They don’t go to planets with rain very often, and he kind of misses it, the way everything smells so fresh and new afterwards. He doesn’t know if they’ll still be here when it stops, but he can hope. Then he sees a familiar mess of black hair, though it’s longer now, and a uniform he wishes he saw less of. Keith.

  Keith who is sitting on a rock, gazing up at the sky with sad eyes as rain slides down the back of his hood. It’s kind of beautiful, in a way. But also, Lance can’t imagine that Blade uniform works well with water. It probably made it even tighter. Lance wishes he had an umbrella, but his jacket’s probably big enough to shield both of them.

  Lance slides out the castle door, boots squelching against the mud as he crosses over the soft pad of the ground to where Keith is sitting. Keith takes a sharp intake of breath and Lance knows Keith sees him, even if he hasn’t acknowledged him yet. Lance wonders if he should leave, but then Keith suddenly turns his head, catching Lance’s eyes with a soft smile.

  Lance returns the grin with a playful one of his own, eyebrow sloping down as he takes a few steps forward. He glances down at the rock and thinks about how painful it’s going to be against his wet jeans and decides to fuck it. Lance peels off his coat, holding it over his and Keith’s head as he slides onto the rock next to him. Their shoulders bump together as he sits, and Keith raises an eyebrow as he leans toward Lance, smile still there. Lance takes that as a good sign. “I thought you were probably getting cold, and that costume might be kind of heavy when it’s wet.”

  “Actually no, the material is almost like a wetsuit outside of the armored parts,” Keith murmurs as he holds out his arm in front of Lance. Lance runs his fingertips over the parts in between, feeling the skintight material, somewhere between mesh and latex but more solid, between his fingertips. It’s like Keith has a second skin. Keith’s smile fades as his eyebrows press together. “It’s different than the armor.”

  “Better?” Lance whispers before he can stop himself, wincing a little as Keith stares at him with wide eyes. Lance pulls his hand back from Keith’s arm, tempted to run away with his jacket. Then Keith bumps their shoulders together again, a brief smile coming over his face before it fades away.

  “Just different,” Keith answers in a tight voice, gaze growing harder as he stares off at the trees in front of him. Keith takes a deep breath, cocking his head at Lance as he brushes his hand over Lance’s with tired eyes. He looks younger and older than he ever did at the Castle. “Not better.”

  “You know you can come back Keith, the mission to find Lotor’s kind of over since he found you instead,” Lance reminds him with a crooked grin, resisting the urge to pull him into a tight hug or ruffle his hair. Their friendship never quite got there, the only hug between them a group one, and Lance wishes they had suddenly. He settles for squeezing Keith’s hand gently.

  “Math, Lance,” Keith says in a clipped voice as he looks away, and Lance can feel Keith pulling – pushing – him away from him. Lance blinks owlishly, not letting go of his hand as he tries to figure out what Keith’s talking about now. Then Keith turns back to him with a soft smile that doesn’t reach his eyes and Lance remembers.

  “Leave the math to Pidge,” Lance tells in a tight voice, squeezing Keith’s hand as they sit there on the rock. Lance doesn’t know if his words got through to Keith, but when they walk into the castle, hands still brushing against each other every few seconds, he thinks he’s made a few dents. That’s a start.


	2. Identity

Keith stares into the mirror, clumsily hung against the wall in his Blade quarters. With his mask and hood down, Keith can see himself more clearly than he has since he left. But the face feels unfamiliar, even though it’s his own sharp angles and strange eyes staring back at him blankly. He is not himself, but Keith has no idea what that means, so maybe he actually is. At the end of the day, Keith doesn’t know who he is, but he knows who everyone else thinks he is, and sometimes he wonders if that’s enough.

  Shiro thinks he’s a leader, or will be, his protégé. Shiro is always telling him how much potential he has, how he’s quick thinking and instinctive and determined. Shiro looks at Keith and sees himself, but raw and young and in need of honing. Keith … Keith knows Shiro is wrong, or at least partially, that he and Shiro are the same but also worlds apart.

  In some ways, Kolivan isn’t that different from Shiro. He sees something in Keith too, but in a different way. He doesn’t want him to be a leader (and Keith’s pretty relieved about that), but he sees Keith like the Blade. Honor before all us, knowledge or death. He’s frustrated that Keith can’t let go of trying to save everyone else, keeps reminding him the best way to protect what he loves is not to have attachments. Keith can’t save anything if he wants to save everyone. But that isn’t Keith either. Not really.

  Lance sees a rival, a hotheaded loner with too much talent and not enough social grace. Or he did, anyway. Things started to change after Shiro disappeared and Keith failed over and over again, just not in the way Keith expected. Lance … trusted him now, opened up to him a little. Keith thinks Lance sees those things, but he thinks he also sees a friend. He’d like to be that someday.

  Allura is complicated, sometimes Keith thinks she still hates him and other days he thinks she might be his best friend after Shiro. She wants him to be what the Garrison did, a true soldier, a knight of Voltron. Keith got so close to being that, of fitting. Then the parades and Coalition started and Keith couldn’t be that either. He tried but … it’s not him. He’s not the white knight.

  Hunk is a hard one too. At first Keith thinks Hunk identifies him the same way that Lance does and leaves it that. Then then Weblum happens and Keith thinks Hunk sees him a little differently, as someone a little softer and younger and it’s ... he wants Keith to be funny and open and Keith isn’t. Pidge and Keith have an understanding. She sees him as a friend, a fellow cryptid hunter, a nerd. But she also sees him as very lonely, as incapable of being on the same page as her or even reading the book. Keith knows he doesn’t fit that, wonders if Pidge would too if she’d gone with him to the Blade the first time.

  All of these different versions of Keith, the young leader, the self-sacrificing Blade, the hotheaded rival, the noble knight, the awkward friend, the pragmatic loner exist. Keith just has no idea which of them are real and which of them are just Keith’s everyone else has created. Keith brushes a finger across his cheek and watches the gloved hand in the mirror do the same, hoping that he’ll figure it out soon. Keith wants to know who he is and where he belongs, he just doesn’t know where the answer lies.

  Keith pulls his hood up as his mask comes down. The answer isn’t here.


	3. Home

  Keith has never had a place to call home while he was old enough to remember it. Even while his dad was still around, they were always moving, never staying in a town for more than the school year. Now that Keith knows he’s part alien, he guesses that makes more sense. He tries to convince himself he doesn’t care, because a home isn’t anything but a house, right? Keith’s had dozens of those, foster parent and group homes, the faces always changing before Keith can get attached. It’s fine.

  He tells that to one of his case workers once and she tells him that isn’t a home once. A home is a place where you feel safe, cared for, little pieces of you spread throughout before you even realize it. Where the people there, if there are any, care about you. Keith had nodded, giving her a small smile before asking about his next group home. He stopped dreaming of something like that long before he was 14.

  Now he’s older, clad in his blade uniform and still as homeless as ever. The Blade headquarters aren’t one, colder and emptier than the Castle, no one greeting each other. They’re soldiers of a specific kind, lives meant to be sacrificed. There is nothing but the mission and attachments are dangerous. They happen sometimes, Keith sees the way Kolivan looks at his photo of himself and Antok, but they’re not spoken of when they do.

  Keith isn’t that person. Kolivan tells him as much one day after a mission when Keith saves his life over gathering intel.

  Keith doesn’t remember how everything plays out, but he finds himself in front of the castle doors, nervous as the doors slide open. He can at least get his own clothes, if nothing else. The team hadn’t sent him away. But that doesn’t mean they’ll want Keith back now that the Blade isn’t sure they want him. Kolivan hadn’t kicked him out, but he’d told him to go to the paladins and sort out where he belonged, where he could do the most good. Keith thought he’d already done that.

  Keith walks through the hallway, smiling softly as he sees the living room, furniture somehow pristinely white even though they all eat on it all the time, passing by the kitchen down to the bedrooms. So far, he’s avoided everyone and Keith sighs in relief as he gets to his room. Or what was his room. Maybe it’s Matt’s now.

  Keith slides through the door and is surprised to find the room as empty almost how he left it. His jacket is still hanging on the wall, boots lined up on the floor next to it. Keith takes a few steps forward and pulls open his drawer to find it lined with black t-shirts and jeans. It’s like he hasn’t been gone for a month. Except there’s … more to the room. The sheets are red now, small plants lined up against the wall on the other side of the room and a poster of Mothman. Holy shit, did they meet Mothman without him?

  “Keith?” Pidge’s voice rings out and Keith turns on his heel, eyes widening as he’s suddenly hit with a small body. A little less small Keith notes with a slight smile, Pidge’s head bumping into his chin. She was growing, he might end up being number five after all. “You’re back?”

  “Maybe?” Keith says with a small shrug, dropping his bag to the floor as he hugs her back for a second. Then he takes a few steps back from her, glancing around his room and landing back on the plants. He scrunches his eyebrows together as he stares. “Did someone else move in?”

  “No!” Pidge snaps loud enough that Keith’s gaze shoots back to her, mouth opening a little in shock. The last time he heard that tone it’d been … well him yelling at them before he went to the Blade the first time. Pidge takes a deep breath and gives him a sheepish smile, peering at him over his glasses. “Shiro said you liked plants, so we got you plants. You like cryptids, so Matt drew you that Mothman poster. You wear a lot of red, so Lance got you those sheets at space mall.”

  “Matt can draw?” Keith asks before he can stop himself, blinking owlishly as he wonders if he should’ve known that or not. Pidge gives him a flat look and Keith takes a deep breath, glancing over at her. “But why?”

  Pidge shrugs a little as she takes a step back toward the door. Her smile is a little weaker now, more nervous. “Everyone else’s room looked like a _room_ , yours didn’t. We wanted it be … nicer when you got back.”

  “Oh,” Keith murmurs as he looks down at the floor, biting his lip a bit. Pidge says ‘room’ with the same inflection his case worker said ‘home’. The other paladins want him to feel like the Castle is his home. Keith swallows again, though he knows his voice is still watery when he finally looks up at Pidge again. “Thanks. It’s good to be home.”

  Pidge smiles, wide and bright and before he can stop himself, Keith wraps her up in another tight hug. He’s not surprised when suddenly Hunk bursts in, wrapping his arms around both of them, Lance and Allura following a few seconds later. They’re a family after all, and TV always told him they’re bad at knocking. Keith can’t wait to find out.


	4. Past/Future

“Daddy, these tomatoes are really red,” five-year old Keith murmurs as he pokes one where it hangs on the branch, rich and heavy under his fingertips. He reaches out with his other hand, pulling on the edge of his daddy’s sleeve. “can we grow them?”

  “Of course, Keith,” His dad answers with a slight smile, gaze warm as he stares down at Keith. His brown eyes almost look like gold in the summer light. Keith is jealous, he always wanted brown eyes like daddy. Instead his eyes are a strange purple-grey, a color everyone tells him is ‘unusual’ but Keith knows that just means weird. Daddy told him.

  Keith shakes his head from the thought, reaching out to grab a carrot and throw it in their cart. His daddy picks him up suddenly, sliding him into the seat in front of it. Keith will be too big for that soon, so he doesn’t complain. Keith points down at the carrots with an excited grin. “What about carrots?”

  “Those too,” his dad assures him as leans over and ruffles his hair, turning the grocery cart down the next aisle. Keith tries to grab a box of cookies off the shelf, but his dad slides them back on with a small shake of his head.

  “And apples?” Keith asks as he waves his hands out, because if he doesn’t get cookies then he wants to grow an apple tree. Plus then he could climb it and have a swing off of it too in their yard. They’ve been in this house for almost a whole year, so he bets they’re going to stay there this time.

  “Those might be a little harder, buddy,” His dad says in a soft voice, gaze growing far away and distant as they keep going down the aisle. Then he gives Keith a warm smile. “But we can go pick them in the fall.”

  “But then I don’t get to play in the dirt,” Keith mumbles as he crosses his arms around his stuffed hippo Henry, earning a sharp laugh from his father. Keith joins in a moment later, warmth filling his chest as they turn the aisle.

  ****

  “So you mean these flowers release a pollen that heals burns?” 22 year old Keith asks as he holds up a deceptively simple pink blossom. Nothing about it gives away that it has any medicinal properties, but then that’s the beauty of plants. They contain multitudes that no one can imagine. Keith smiles as he turns the flower over in his hand, ignoring Hunk’s sigh from his right. He’s almost done shopping.

  “Yes, Red Paladin,” The Olkari woman says as she hands him a bag of seeds. Keith smiles and nods, about to reach in his pocket when he sees them. Beautiful orange blossoms with spikes coming out of them, long and purple, like the blade at his waist. He barely even hears the low groan from Hunk as he runs a finger against the blossoms. The woman smiles knowingly. “Would you like to hear about these ones with the spikes?”

 

  “Yes,” Keith says with a crooked smile at the same time as Hunk mutters ‘no’ under his breath. They end up staying another hour, but Keith finds apple seeds (or something that looks enough like apples, anyway) and even Hunk’s willing to admit it was worth it.

  ****

  “Daddy, daddy, play Power Rangers with me!” Six year old Keith cries as he runs toward his dad, holding up his action figures excitedly. They just moved to Kansas, a small house in the woods, and there’s no other kids anywhere. Keith only has his dad to play with, but he doesn’t mind. Not when dad says that’s the only way they can stay safe. Keith wants to fight whatever bad guys are after them, but he’s not going to make daddy if he’s not ready yet. Plus then Keith can get big and strong enough to protect both of them by himself.

  His father nods and sits down on the floor, taking one of the action figures with a small smile. He raises an eyebrow at Keith, asking a question they both already know the answer to. “What color do you want to be?”

  “Red! Red is the leader!” Keith cries as he holds up the red ranger excitedly, making him fly across the air. Power Rangers couldn’t fly, but daddy doesn’t need to know that. Besides, when Keith is a hero, his team will.

  ****

  Keith is 23 when the catlike aliens, who Hunk seems stangely afraid of, approach him. He blinks a little as they give him a once over, exchanging unsure looks. Finally the leader, a woman with grey fur and pointed ears addresses him. “are you the leader?”

  “No, I’m the Red paladin,” Keith says quickly with his hands up, as though that’s answer enough. His tenure as the Black Paladin had been thankfully short and years ago, and he’s not about to repeat it any time soon. Keith lets out a small sigh at the blank looks, because apparently the ice shows weren’t enough to convince them after all. Keith glances over Shiro and gives a quick nod. “He’s the leader.”

  “For now,” Shiro answers warmly, even as he gives Keith a teasing look out of the corner of his eye. Keith’s hands stiffen around his bayard, even though he’s pretty sure the Black Lion would just pick Allura or Lance or even Pidge this time. She’s finally tall enough.

  “I don’t plan on switching colors again, Shiro,” Keith answers him back with a small smirk, Red’s echoing purr calming him as he presses a hand against the cool metal of her mouth. He’s got a family and it includes Red. They’re not parting ways again.

  ****

  “I want to go home,” 9 year old Keith mutters softly from the waiting room, kicking his legs in the air. His feet don’t quite reach the floor. He’s always been small for his age. The nurse gives him a sympathetic smile, handing him a juice box. But she doesn’t answer his question and his dad doesn’t wake up. Keith finds out home isn’t a thing he has anymore.

  ****

  “I want to go home,” 24 year old Keith mutters to Allura, glancing around the room to make sure that no one else heard him. He doesn’t want to offend the coalition, but Keith doesn’t do well with crowds and they’ve been at this party for nearly four hours. He’s at the end of his patience even though he likes the Arusians.

  “Twenty more minutes, I promise,” Allura whispers as another man comes over to shake his hand, asking Keith about how the latest effort to rebuild the cities of Olkari are going. Keith gives short answers, trying to keep his voice steady. He doesn’t mind this as much as he did when he was younger, but he’s relieved when he’s back in the castle an hour later, surrounded by the people he considers family as they argue over what to watch on TV. Keith’s always happiest at home.


	5. Just Keith Things (Gardening)

  Keith lines up the flowers carefully, making sure none of the petals brush together. it’s silly, he knows that, but he wants to make sure they all have their own space. If he needs it, his plants probably do too. But not too much, either. That just ends with slow growth and dead petals. Keith moves over to the carrots, and Keith has no idea how the guy at the space mall got them. He does know that they’re growing nicely despite the different texture of Olkarian soil, firm and sweet. It’s a nice reminder of earth, of home, even if earth is less home for him than the Castle.

  “Hey Keith, are you coming to dinner?” Shiro calls as he walks into the makeshift greenhouse in one of the backrooms of the castles, his fingers brushing over the leaves of something that looked like a palm tree with large purple fruit attached. They’re still all too afraid to try eating them, but Keith’s been giving it more and more thought (in the end he turns purple for a week).

  “What?” Keith asks as he blinks up owlishly, glancing down at the watch they’d made. He said he’d be in here for fifteen ticks, but yeah, it’d been more like 60. Keith gives Shiro a small smile as he stands up from where he’s kneeling on the floor, brushing a few leaves out of his hair. Shiro lets out a soft snort as he comes to his side, resting a hand on his shoulder. “Oh yeah, I’m sorry, I got a little focused.”

  “It’s fine, we were just starting to worry,” Shiro tells him in a warm voice, gaze gentle though Keith can see the last dying embers of that anxiety there. The team has been overprotective since they found out just how many times Keith almost died while a Blade. Keith guesses he can’t blame them, given how he acted when Shiro disappeared. But he’s fine. Really. Shiro’s smile suddenly grows more curious as he presses a finger against a yellow blossom. “You really like plants, don’t you?”

  “They’re quiet,” Keith mutters as he runs a hand over the same flower, gaze growing soft as the petals curl toward him. He gets plants and they, to the extent they’re sentient (which it turns out varies a lot more on space than on earth) get him.

  “Should I feel insulted?” Shiro asks with a raised eyebrow, glancing down at Keith with a hint of a smirk. Keith shakes his head a little, not sure if Shiro means of the plants or of him since the plants aren’t curling toward him at all. That’s what Shiro gets for never coming into the greenhouse.

  “I like all of you too,” Keith says after a beat, giving Shiro a crooked grin, though his gaze reveals the seriousness of his words. He needs them to know he didn’t leave them for the Blade. He joined the Blade because he thought it was his best chance to stop Zarkon, the best way to protect them. He was just wrong. But now he’s home and they’re all still safe and things are okay. They’re more okay than they’ve been in months, and it almost scares him. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Tell Hunk I’m bringing the spacematoes.”

  “Tomatoes aren’t spicy,” Shiro mutters as he gives Keith another pat on the arm, even as his expression fills with disgust. Keith lets out a small laugh, echoing across the greenhouse and making a few of the plants shiver. Yeah, everything’s good now.


End file.
